SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. In the world of rankings and SEO, it’s a norm to keep track of the website ranking, and there’s only one way to do that, which is to scrape the search results. It doesn’t matter if you’re tracking the results or doing some cool project where you need to scrape SERP’s, there will always be some hurdles.
How to Scrap SERP’s: the right way
Generally, while scrapping any search engine, an opposing force of algorithms will try their best to kick you out and stop you from using up their resources. To be even more specific, Google disapproves of using any automated access in their terms of service. In this snippet, we suggest some ways on how to avoid being detected and scrape a large number of SERP‘s at once.
Staring Slowly and Steady
It’s straightforward if you follow the rules, and play it right. First and foremost, slow down the procedure. Give a 40-50 ms gap between each request where you change the page. Put something that qualifies your bot as a human, maybe some random sleep time after you’re done with some couple of scrapes.
The primary agenda here is not to startle the search engine with too many consecutive requests. Don’t you worry on slowing the procedure down, we have given a solution to make your tool a clockwork, keep reading!
Google Checks Your IP address: Change it frequently
Now that you are taking things slowly, it’s time to start using a proxy IP address. Get your hands on a reliable proxy source. Use 100-200 different IP’s as per the amount of data you want to fetch. Always use the ones that are never used before with search engines.
Also, it’s an excellent practice to disable cache altogether, or clearing it every time after you change the IP address. If you don’t do this, undoubtedly there is a system in place that will recognize you by the input frequency and variance in keywords. Once if they catch you, never continue, stop the bot, start fresh, clear the cache, and use a new IP.
Here, the primary key is to think like a human and match the actions. You can change the proxy after every keyword change. Scrape for about 300 results, put some variations in keyword by making it longtail, as there won’t be much change in the results. If by any chance you come across a captcha or something is not right, and it says there’s a virus in the system, they caught you red-handed. Stop the process and change the IP.
Rotate your UserAgent
Best way to get more scrapping done is by changing UserAgent. It merely means to request from a different browser. For one keyword you’re using Firefox, and for others it’s chrome. It’s advisable to rotate it when a different a KW gets popped. Make a list of multiple user agents and keep switching.
Use API or Readymade Source code to make things easy
There are companies out there who have made this job a piece of cake. Zenserp is one of them. You can bet their API’s to do the job for you. It takes care of all the above things and never lets you down. Furthermore, some of them also provide an option to search from a specific region and claims to ensure accurate results.
There are many open-source codes available that does what you want to achieve. It has everything from IP management to making activity look like humans. If not use it, then you can at least check the source code and learn the basic principles and implement it in your project.
Making the SERP scrapping efficient
Multithreading! Yes, it’s complicated but effective. It’s not suggested to do this for a small scale project. Just in case if you are to make it available for public use or utilize it in some use-case, were getting multiple requests is a possibility, use multithreading.
Conclusion
Dropping a cold fact, back in 2011, Google caught Bing for scrapping its search results to improve their own. Since then, everything has evolved a lot. Using API’s will save you the trouble but cost you some budget. Any which ways, follow the above-mentioned practices to trick search engines and scrape large amounts of SERPs without being blocked.